Disquiet

When I was working, earlier this year, on my article for JSTOR Daily about the origins of the modern usage of the word “soundscape,” statistics briefly reared its characteristically ambiguous head. In the piece I wrote, “The word soundscape was essentially a linguistic nonentity until the late 1960s. Then it took off, steadily at first, soon after astronomically.” The data I cited came by way of the Google Books Ngram, which helpfully charts relative usage of words over time. However, even after an evident and sharp increase of frequency in recent decades, the word “soundscape” still ranked at .0000367606 percent — which is to say, exceedingly small. 

Or seemingly so. Of course, it’s all relative. There are so many words in the English language (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, as of 1993, included almost half a million) that ultimately most of them have a tiny occurrence rate. It’s the rate of usage in the context of the consistency of adoption — that is, of increasing use — that matters here. For example, think of words like “specious” or “miasma.” Those two words and “soundscape” all have relatively equivalent usage today (per the above graph), but when you look over time, “specious” has had an absolutely massive drop since the early 1800s, whereas “miasma” has had a fairly consistent rate across the past two centuries. In contrast, over the last 50 years, “soundscape” went from essentially zero usage to equivalent to those two other words. This rise of “soundscape” from near-zero is a measure of a word that would have been almost meaningless in conversation before, say, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and is now easily understood in everyday use.

By the way, the data shown in the above graphs is now outdated. As it happens, right after my soundscape story was published by JSTOR, the Google Ngram database was updated (to 2022, from 2019), resulting in a notable and questionable drop-off for all three words of the words I cite above as examples:

The visible steep decline strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder what words were on the rise, or more broadly what circumstances changed such as to cause such a change across the board.

Before finishing this summary, I did a quick search of my email account, to take stock of how the word “soundscape” is being used today. There was an example that described a real-time descriptive aid for the blind as contributing to their personal soundscape. There were multiple references to the soundscapes produced by electronic musicians, sometimes in the sense of an immersive, and thus quasi-environmental, context, and in other cases in the sense of scene-setting for specifically alien and otherwise unusual spaces. Sometimes the word was associated with a separate genre term, such a “neoclassical” or “Afro House,” that seems contrary to the concept of a soundscape, but that takes on a new meaning in combination. A museum exhibit with multiple genres of music accompanying visual art was described as having an “interdependent soundscape.” And a piece of music-making software described itself as useful in the crafting of soundscapes. 

And those examples were just from emails I received during the past 36 hours. The word “soundscape” has evolved and its meaning has expanded as it has emerged into popular use and gained currency over the past half century or so, and it will continue to.